A Harvard-based task force set up in the wake of an agreement by MySpace and …

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Roughly one year ago, MySpace came to an agreement with all 50 of the state Attorneys General, one in which it promised to do more to protect its younger users from various dangers thought to be lurking online. Although the agreement included a variety of specific steps to be taken by the social networking site, it also included a clause that directed MySpace to set up a task force to examine the issue of the online safety of children more generally. That task force has now completed its work and issued a final report, but at least one Attorney General is already arguing that the report understates the dangers.

The analysis was organized by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the task force included relevant academics and advocates, as well as members from major players in the online world, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, various ISPs, social networking sites, and a number of security companies. Its members performed a literature review, examined security technology from a number of sources, and consulted with a variety of authorities from the relevant fields. The entire report has been made available online.

Overall, the report generally concludes that the general public may have an impression that the Internet is awash in predatory pedophiles, but that picture is simply unsupported by the research that's available. Those risks that do exist don't appear to be specific to the online world, as the report suggests, "the risks minors face online are complex and multifaceted and are in most cases not significantly different than those they face offline." As one of the participants stated, "the truth is that there is no 'Internet safety,' there is simply 'safety.'"

So, for example, when it comes to pornography and nudity, the majority of the exposure occurs offline, through traditional media such as TV and movies. A number of younger individuals do get exposed to images they find disturbing online, but the majority of those who view porn online are older adolescent boys who have actively sought it out. In a significant number of these cases, the images that disturb adolescents the most are the ones produced by their fellow adolescents; as the report notes, "there are also concerns about other content, including child pornography and the violent, pornographic, and other problematic content that youth themselves generate."

The task force also examined bullying and harassment online, but came to the same conclusion as other recent studies: it happens, but it's generally happening as an extension of the child's offline social world, rather than as a distinct Internet phenomenon.

Strangers with 'Net candy

When it comes to sexual solicitation, the fraction of individuals targeted by adult strangers is quite small. Most of the youth targeted are older adolescents, and a large majority of those solicitations come from someone under 25; in many cases, they involve other adolescents. Many of those on the receiving end don't view the solicitations they've received as inappropriate, and somewhere in the area of 98 percent of those targeted in this manner brush off the suggestions without giving it much further thought. Far from being innocent victims, the youth who choose to act on these solicitations generally know exactly what they're doing, and their choice is often symptomatic of larger problems. "The psychosocial makeup of and family dynamics surrounding particular minors," the report notes, "are better predictors of risk than the use of specific media or technologies."

The report also looks at whether we could be doing more to protect youth from themselves and their peers through software. Its authors were impressed by a variety of the solutions that they saw, but noted that most of these were focused on specific sites or protocols, rather than being a general solution to online risks, and that many were still in the formative stages. In any case, they were somewhat skeptical of "one size fits all" solutions, given that they represent a single point of failure, security wise, and anything that protects individuals based on age carries the risk of enabling the identification of young users.

The report does stress that there are significant gaps in our knowledge, as most of the studies in the literature were performed before the rise of social networking sites. They argue that there is a need to fund more up-to-date research.

The need for more resources—for research, for law enforcement, and for parents and kids themselves—was the consistent theme of the recommendations. Although it wasn't stated explicitly by the authors, actually providing those resources would be a stark contrast to how the matter is typically handled. The inherent horror of crimes perpetrated against children makes it easy to spur the public to outrage and demands for change, but it's another matter entirely to convince the public that they need to spend the money to actually identify and institute appropriate changes in the longer term.

At least one of the Attorneys General that helped arrange for this report would apparently prefer the focus stay on the horror. Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal, who is specifically singled out for thanks by the report's authors, is quoted by The New York Times as saying its focus on available statistics "downplayed the predator threat."